The most effective anti-vandalism measure is an active community. We have a team of people (the Recent Changes Patrol monitoring all edits made, and vandalism and spam are quickly reverted.

We are also looking at other measures such as bots (as used with great efficiency at Wikipedia) to monitor and quickly revert vandalism.

See also the talk page, for further discussion.

Settings[edit | edit source]

Restricting permissions for page moves[edit | edit source]

Page moves are harder to revert than other changes, so we added this to our LocalSettings.php: 

# To thwart vandalism these adjustments (intended)
# to limit move permission to "autoconfirmed" users
$wgAutoConfirmAge                             = 3600*24*10; // 10 days
$wgAutoConfirmCount                           = 10; // 10 edits required
$wgGroupPermissions['user']['move']           = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['autoconfirmed']['move']  = true;

(Note: the variables are linked to relevant resources, above, but you can ignore that in LocalSettings.php and just paste in plain text.)

Suggestions[edit | edit source]

  • implement a bot or bots taken (with permission) from Wikipedia spam & vandal-fighters. E.g. Tawkerbot.W These could run on the server, for faster, 24-hour operation.
  • ban page creation by anons & new accounts (like Wikipedia) - On Appropedia, it is likely that some readers will never sign up until they are ready to create a page based on their project.
  • implement soft-protection for pages that are spam targets
  • reverse Turing tests
    • Currently implemented in some cases.
  • Implementing the semi-protectionW function [DONE - this option is now available to admins], to use when existing, legitimate pages become repeat targets for negative behavior of any kind. For technical details, see:

Extensions[edit | edit source]

Patterns[edit | edit source]

Patterns of spam (e.g. particular forms of url, HTML markup, or words) can be noted on the patterns subpage. This can then be used to tighten our spam url blacklist and AbuseFilter settings.

Patterns in pagenames can be blocked too - admins can edit these patterns at MediaWiki:Titleblacklist.

See also[edit | edit source]

Interwiki links[edit | edit source]

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